Michelangelo Antonioni – The Architecture of Vision (1996)

A collection of interviews and essays, many of them never before available in English, from one of the most important postwar Italian filmmakers. Antonioni’s cinema is “a world of images, not of words,” but this volume, published in Italy two years ago, is chockablock with the filmmaker’s words. Ironically, Antonioni had seldom written on films before he started making them. As a result, virtually all of the material in this book is about his own films and filmmaking experience. He has said, “Writing for me is a deepening of the gaze,” but he’s generally been one of those filmmakers who is reluctant to talk or write about his work. Given the intensely visual nature of his film poetry and the cryptic, elliptical dialogue that accompanies it, it is surprising how concise and analytical he is in the many interviews included in this volume. The book is divided into four sections: “My Cinema,” a series of general discussions of Antonioni’s aesthetic ideas; “My Films,” short pieces on individual films, including all of his best-known work (Blow Up, L’Avventura, Red Desert, Zabriskie Point, among others); “Interviews” and “Interviews on My Films,” which cover his career and specific works, respectively. Unfortunately, the pieces and interviews on individual films often call for a readership with an intimate knowledge of the movie in question, and for the nonspecialist may be a hard slog. Antonioni is ruthlessly candid, a brilliant talker, and an interesting writer. Although it is the fans of his cinema that will profit most from this collection, any serious student of film should give it a look.